Dance
Suhaee Abro: The Dancing Girl of Sindh
Dancer and actress Suhaee Abro opens up about her background, struggles and evolution as a performer.
“At the age of nine, I wrote myself a letter in broken English saying I had found myself in dance and wanted to be a professional dancer. A lot of my friends thought it was crazy and it’d change as I grew up. But I stuck by it.”
In a way, Sindh’s modern-day ‘dancing girl’ Suhaee Abro was destined to be a performer. Her father Khuda Bux Abro is a visual artist and her mother Attiya Dawood a writer and poetess.
“From the beginning, we have never been the kind of family who owned houses and cars. All we ever saw was books, music and paintings in our house. Growing up with my elder sister, we were always exposed to arts. She went into literature and writing, while I developed interest towards music and dance,” says the 25-year-old dancer and actress.
“A dancer first, an actress later” - Suhaee Abro
© Nadir Toosy
“According to my mother and grandmother, I hadn’t started walking yet, and there was music playing on the TV, and I took the support of the wall and tried to move my body to its rhythm. That’s their first memory of me dancing, so they tell me I’ve always been dancing.”
BEGINNING AND STRUGGLES
She went on to start formal classical training at the age of seven under the veteran Sheema Kermani. She also began appearing in TV dramas and telefilms since her early teenage years however, she’s adamant that she’s a dancer first, an actress later.
But it’s only now she has become one of the known names in the local dance scene, which is barely surviving on its own. With the lack of infrastructure and opportunities, Abro’s journey hasn’t been as easy as one would think, with the multitude of health problems, rejections and stereotypes that she has had to overcome.
She narrates the story of a play she worked on in her early teen years. “It was a telefilm where my mother played a prostitute’s role and I’m her daughter. Because I’m dark and ugly, nobody likes me but then I’m good at dancing. I get these roles a lot. It’s annoying. I used to look at it as if it’s a bold role, while other girls play the typical roles of pretty girls. I get to do something different,” she says, her tone remaining as polite as always.
“But then I got sick of it thinking why can’t I ever be the educated one? I don’t mind doing roles where I belong to the village. I played one in My Pure Land (Britain’s entry for Best Foreign Language Picture at last year’s Oscars). It has nothing to do with being ugly or anything and was a beautiful character to play. My problem is I get such roles on purpose because I am dark, I come from Sindh and I have a desi face.”
She says she’s often advised to opt for skin whitening treatments or dye her hair because she has a few white ones, but she doesn’t.
“Because it’s natural. It matters to people how you look and what brands you wear or what phone you have. It’s never mattered to me. To me, it’s about what I’m comfortable with. I’ll never do it because other people ask me to.”
She says now that she has short hair, people talk to her in English. “I speak Urdu and Sindhi just fine. We don’t have to force communicate in English That’s why I get so sick of this industry at times.”
A few years after the telefilm, while working on a television play, she was asked by the director to jump from one rooftop to another. “He said girls are always scared, look at me, I weigh so much and even I can do it. So, I’m a fiery person and I thought even if I die, I’d show him I could do it. I did but the roof where I landed collapsed because it was weak already. I fell into the house, and the roof fell on top of me. I was in the ICU for a while. A lot of my health problems started after that incident. A year later, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I don’t know if it’s related or not but I couldn’t dance for a while after that.”
Suhaee Abro
© Nadir Toosy
The life-threatening incident wasn’t enough to stop her as she kept at it, working as an actress as well as a dancer. In fact, since then, she has not only continued performing classical dance but also delved into contemporary styles and evolved as a performer.
“I started self-learning through YouTube and watching some performances in India. Then I was invited to a 3-day audition at a university in Berlin. It was more like a workshop. I didn’t get selected, but those few days changed my life,” she shares.
“That rejection hit me, because I’ve often been rejected. First, I was rejected in India because I was epileptic, so they didn’t want to take responsibility. And here, it was because I didn’t have contemporary training. But just being there helped a lot.”
A few years later, she embarked on a journey to Italy. “That’s where my actual contemporary training started. I lived there for two years as a part of this program in Turin.”
However, taking into account the health issues, rejections as well as the snail-pace growth of the dance industry, there’s bound to be moments of despair. Abro agrees.
“Coming from a middle class family and having responsibilities for myself and my family, I’ve had moments of wanting to give up, out of not being able to earn enough out of it, because the kind of dance that I do doesn’t get me much except appreciation and respect, which is great but I can’t live off that.”
She says she’s expected to do Bollywood-inspired and commercially acceptable dance and look glamorous and beautiful to entertain people which in return will pay me. “It’s been almost 19 years since I started dancing and now finally, I’m not dependent on my parents. I’m not in school anymore and I want to be responsible and not be dependent on my parents or my future husband later on.”
Despite the bitterness, she feels happy and responsible because “there are so many boys and girls who look up to me, especially young women. They think if she can do it, so can our daughters and sisters.”
Abro has surely established her name as a young and talented performer in Pakistan at a young age. “The only way I have survived so far is because I do acting on the side. Now I think I have finally made a name for myself. People in Pakistan give me much more importance than before. There was a time when they knew me as an actress, but I was always a dancer first. And now they know me as a dancer too because I’ve been at it.”
Suhaee performs in a show; “With love, Jahanara”
© Vicky Zhuang Yi-Zin
But merely ‘making it’ is not enough for Abro. Because she has had to take breaks to focus on health, she feels she has lost time and needs to make up for that now. “I do understand the importance of not pushing my body too much because my health is important and I’m young right now. At the same time, I do feel this is the time to learn new things. I’m 25 and it sounds young but for a dancer, it’s different. There’s different techniques that I’d like to learn.”
One of the things she wants to get into is circus arts. “I want to see if I can incorporate those techniques into dance. I don’t know if I can do it because I get shivery at times due to my epilepsy, but I’d love to try. I love the contemporary circus arts scene in Europe. In Turin, there were a lot of dancers and circus artists. You’d see them everywhere.”
LAHOOTI MELO 2019
Abro has performed at Lahooti Melo every year since 2016. While performing at the festival’s founder Saif Samejo’s songs is a tradition for her, this time around, she added in some contemporary pieces as well but she says it didn’t exactly turn out the way she wanted it to.
She was already exhausted by the time her turn to perform came. “There was a long stretch in the beginning where I was just improvising. And I felt like the audience knew I was exhausted. But later everyone said ‘wow, where did you get all this energy from’ and they appreciated the performance. I realized it was all in my head.”
She continues, “And just after the performance, I had a seizure, so I ran backstage and into that exclusive area where there was no one. I sat there for a bit. A couple of people came to sit with me. But it’s not something the audience wouldn’t know or understand. When I’m in front of an audience, I’m in a different world.”
It's evident, depending on the piece she’s performing, her Sindhi identity comes into play in it. Her Dastaan-e-Moomal Rano performance at Lahooti Melo clearly did a spell on the audience who was seen waving and swirling to the tune and in sync with her moves.
“When I think of being Eastern or being one with my culture, I immediately go into my Sindhi side. I use Sindhi or Marvari music, dress in our traditional style. At the end of the day, this is my identity. This is who I am. I speak the language, I’m very much into Sindhi poetry and our arts. I own it.”
For Abro, the Lahooti platform is sometimes so intimidating and at the same time, so welcoming, because the audience is huge. The latest edition of the festival attracted the largest audience in its short history.
“They are all right in front of you. And they are so close you see their eyes looking at you. I’m not afraid of it anymore but you feel them waiting for you (to perform),” she opens up. “There were a lot more people this time around and I feel they are starting to accept me and my movement.”
Of course, with her evolution as a performer, the criticism directed at her has also evolved. “At first, there was criticism that I was too focused on expressions and emotion rather than technique. Now I hear that my body technique has improved, and my movements are clearer, which is true. I’m probably going to get even better with time. But then it was also said that ‘you need to keep things the way they are. If it’s a folk song, keep it that way.’ For me, it’s all about being able to express, and connecting to the audience and making them feel something. Even if one person out of the audience feels something, it’s an achievement for me.”
On the same note, the ‘My Pure Land’ star adds that a girl messaged her saying she hadn’t cried in a long time and watching her performance at Lahooti Melo this year, she actually cried.
Currently, Abro is travelling between Europe and Pakistan and working on ‘The Sigh of the Musafir’, a UK-Pakistan collaborative project by Arieb Azhar.
Concluding the hour-long interview, the starlet gives sound advice to young dancers trying to make it in Pakistan. “Be ready for all the compromises you’ll have to make and all the mental, emotional and physical hard work. As long as you’re passionate about it, you’ll make it.”
Suhaee Abro
© Asif Khan
“With dancing, you’ll need a lot of physical energy obviously. And you have to do things in a certain way. In this industry, we are often told you have to be skinny. I was told the same. But at one point, I said stop it. I need energy to dance. And eventually my body made its own shape,” she continues. “Now I don’t worry about if I’m eating something particular. Of course, as you grow up, your body takes its own shape.
Accept it the way it is. Young girls are often told that they have to look a certain way. But your health and your strength are more important.”